商品簡介
A Tale of Two Cities: In 1873, there sprang into being in less than a year, the most vast, most secret, most vital, most costly, and fastest engineering project in all human history. It constituted the construction of two titanic secret cities-needing to be equipped with all manner of never-before-imagined, never-before-existing systems such as power generation plants fueled by gravity-driven rivers, and unthinkably vast communications devices required to listen to the stars-built simultaneously and secretly, employing tens of thousands of laborers, who required housing, one on the west coast of Africa and the other on the exact opposite side of the planet on the west coast of Ecuador in the northwestern corner of South America. Forty-two years apart, Allan Quatermain (King Solomon's Mines), and Professor George Edward Challenger (The Lost World) stumbled onto the laboratories/observatories, which had turned the entire planet Earth into one vast interferometer telescope. Accomplished a century and a half ago, this project easily dwarfed all future similarly vast engineering enterprises, such as the Apollo project that sent humans to the moon and the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. According to the engineers, scientists, and industrialists interviewed by the author, that mammoth project was clearly "the greatest single achievement of organized human effort made in the history of humans on earth." Its purpose? To study the remnants of the ancient nova that was thought to have been the Star of Bethlehem. Sadly, none of their objectives were attained nor satisfied-while Fate (with a capital F) had entirely different plans for this "greatest single implementation of organized human effort."
